Is the importance of Blu-Ray overstated?

[MikeB]

@ jalsomni

DVD/Blu-ray player won't read disks? Disks scratched? Player won't eject?

Very uncommon problems. There are industry standards with regard to hardware reliability and nearly all DVD (excluding 360) and or Blu-Ray players have failure rates well within industry standards.

Blu-Ray discs don't scratch, unless you abuse it with a knife or something.

I know nobody with a broken DVD player, I know many people who's harddrive crashed. It happened to me at least 4 times, most recently a couple of months ago I had to buy a new harddrive for my PC. The dead drive was a nice 160 GB IBM drive, very good reviews and all.

The reason why DVD drives fail or have issues so much on the 360 is because they are cheap versions of PC world drives, which are not designed to spin discs continuously at high speed like is required for 360 games. So there are more severe wearing issues which will worsen in course of time, which is also one of the reasons why many people report scratched discs.

It's worth noting that the PS3's Blu-Ray drive is better at reading old scratched DVDs, there's a good chance that old PS2 games and DVDs which fail to read on the PS2 will play just fine on the PS3.